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Seeing another Broadway . . .

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GETTING around the UK is relatively simple, fairly cheap, but after arriving at your destination, parking is very often a different story.

GETTING around the UK is relatively simple, fairly cheap, but after arriving at your destination, parking is very often a different story.

Opinion by Dusty Miller

After church one Sunday, at historic All Saints, Faringdon, I had a wee while to kill before catching the bus from Oxford to Gatwick for the (last) AZ flight back to Ha-ha-ha-rare (Africa’s fun capital!) and thought I’d give the family lunch in the ancient university city.

We were outside Jamie’s Italian (the first of a brasserie chain owned by TV celebrity chef Jamie Oliver) I knew prices were right, we all like pasta; service is reportedly swift. But there was nowhere to park!

After band-temperedly touring the dreaming spires city, nose-to-tail, we headed a short queue trying to get into an underground car park. Ten minutes later it hadn’t moved a centimetre and I was running out of time to catch the 1.15 (Ex-Zimbos to meet for drinks at LGW.)

We gave up hope of finding a parking spot (at £3,10 an hour if you please, nearly US$5). I kissed goodbye to my family and grabbed a quick tea and biscuits at one of the less unpleasant rip-off coffee bar franchises now in every UK high street.

The previous weekend, on a sudden whim, we’d driven to the picturesque Cotswold town of Broadway, filled with history-laden honey-coloured stone-built antique shops, art galleries, antiquarian book dealers and many attractive pubs, hotels and restaurants.

The last time I stopped there, I was 10 (my grand-daughter’s six, grandson two!) but I can still mentally taste beautiful blue-cheese and onion crusty baps, washed down with scrumpy cider in the garden of a pub on the road, which used to be the main thoroughfare from Worcester to London.

After all these years I couldn’t recognise the wayside inn, but the £10 special three course lunch at Broadway Hotel ended with cheese board or a choice of two puddings.

After a fine duck liver terrine with generous side salad and the extra crusty warm bread they smilingly supplied when asked, and a main course of stacks of very thinly sliced roast ham piled on a swede-and-potato mash, accompanied by a “parcel” of streamed green beans and carrots cheerfully served by a waitress model-slim and catwalk-trim, I asked of what did the cheese platter consist, as my family ordered crème-brulees, sticky-toffee puddings and jelly-and-ice-cream.

“Oh, nothing very special: just local Brie, Camembert and Stilton,” she answered in a rustic accent straight out of The Archers, unexpected in one of such tender years.

The cheeses were superbly well kept…especially the Stilton, probably what we’d had in crusty baps the year of Suez, and came with crackers, olives, fruit compote and spicy onion marmalade. Washed down with Cotswold Lager (in my case), shandies, lemonades and fruit juice, the bill was just over £50 for four (about US$75).

Often, having eaten in a place like Broadway, where you’re spoilt for choice, looking in the next eatery makes one regret having grazed relatively early elsewhere.

Definitely NOT the case when I peered into the Lygon Arms, a few doors from the Broadway Hotel. Couples were booking in at both places for bed and breakfast specials (£21 p/p/p/n at the Broadway.)

I didn’t know then that King Charles I conferred with his loyal Royalist advisors in the bar of the Lygon during the bloody English Civil War, nor that his adversary, the warts-and-all stern Puritan Oliver Cromwell, had slept (presumably alone) there.

It was enough for me to peek at the menu, spot a three course table d’hôte lunch there would have been £37,50 a head, to convince me we’d made the right choice.

The Lygon’s now owned by the Barcelo Group, who are welcome to it!

My family live at Faringdon, on one cusp of the Cotswolds, where the Chilterns and Uffingham Hills meet; Broadway is at the further rim. The Cotswolds are the largest of 40 Areas of Outstanding National Beauty in England and Wales Broadway’s parish church is Norman, but dedicated to Saxon Saint Eudburgha. Standing lonely sentinel over the lovely settlement is a folly, Broadway Tower, inspired by master landscape gardener Capability Brown; once owned by William Morris: poet, designer, architect and revolutionary.

Victorian-era artists, writers and intellectuals such as John Singer Sargent, Edward Burne-Jones and Rossetti are associated with the tower and neighbouring estates.

This part of the world is worth visiting — if for nothing else — its colourful place names. Close by you can find Chipping Camden, Morton-in-Marsh, Shipton-under-Wychwoode, Stow-on-the-Wold, Wyck Rissington and the grim-sounding The Slaughters.

On a very recent visit we spent a hot sunny day at Bourton-on-the-Water, famous for its Birdland Park. A huge range of the globe’s birds –many of them threatened species—are kept in lovely surroundings.

Where else can you feed jackass and four other species of penguin, photograph Australian black swans and see Brazilian parrots, raptors and robins all within five minutes’ walk of a lovely tea room?

Pubs and gastro-pubs abound, many offering remarkably reasonable b&b packages. Of these, reminiscent of the Wind in the Willows, the beautifully-named The Trout, at Tadpole Bridge, sticks most firmly in my mind.

Close by is Cirencester, where the Royal Commonwealth Agricultural College is. Presumably before Zimbabwe acquired its pariah status, a handful of Gwebi exchange students were fond of sampling the odd refreshingly chilled article of a moderately intoxicating nature over a game of darts, dominoes, shove ha’penny or Aunt Sally in a local boozer.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the tale, but I was told one old codger, puffing his pipe, asked another: “’Ere ‘Enry . . . where do all these black chaps come from?”

Henry quaffed his pint and answered: “I heard tell something about Zimbabwe, Sam.”

“Zimbabwe…where the ‘ell be that, ’ Enry?”

“Oi don’t rightly know, old chap, but it can’t be too far…they come here every Froiday for fish and chips!”

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